The last couple months have been an incredibly exciting time for fans of the Guild Wars franchise. We received the official announcement of Guild Wars 3, along with confirmation that the team at ANet are fully committed to continuing to not just keep the first two games running, but continue making new content for them. After GW3's release, GW2 will be resuming annual expansions. Until then, the team are planning to take a break from expansion development.
Of course, this "break" isn't really a break at all for the team, because they're going to be hard at work on a different project—going through all the content GW2 has released over the last fourteen years and making improvements across the board to ensure GW2 is the best game it can be. We'll be receiving a mix of new content related to different releases, fixes to various issues in old content, and general improvements to bring things up to modern quality standards.
We don't know much yet about what exactly this entails, aside from the fact that some of the first changes we can expect is an overhauled Zhaitan fight to cap off the Personal Story and a new open-world map in Orr, both of which will be part of the core game available to all players. It's unclear currently if these additions are uniquely large in scope or if we can expect new content of that level across the whole game; either way, I'm incredibly excited.
Guild Wars 2 is my favorite game of all time, and I've been advocating for exactly what ANet are about to do for years. The prospect of completely new content aside, there's so much the game has to offer currently which could be massively improved with just some small changes. That's exactly what I want to talk about in this article today—small things the team could do to make as large an improvement to the game as possible with as little required effort as possible.
My Criteria
Before I get into the meat of my ideas, I'd to explain my methodology in a bit more detail. The team at ANet seem eager to respond to community feedback for this project—only natural, since the entire point is to improve the content we're playing; they need to know what needs fixed—so I'm expecting that the ideas I suggest here will actually reach the team themselves, either because they read this article personally or other readers are inspired to champion the same ideas propose here. My goal, then, is to keep my suggestions realistic.
There are a lot of things I and other players would love to see in the game, but it's important to note that the size of the GW2 team hasn't changed, and developing new content doesn't get easier just because it's being placed into older expansions. I'd love if we, for example, got a full set of four strikes for every expansion and living world season, but that would be an insane amount of work for the team and isn't something I think we can realistically expect in the ~2 year timeframe we have for this maintenance period. ANet have a lot of ground to cover, and they've already committed to some large projects—the aforementioned Zhaitan fight and new map—that are gonna suck up a lot of the resources they have available for this project.
To make a long story short: my goal is for the ideas in this article to be things that ANet could actually, realistically implement. I'm prioritizing ideas that would provide the greatest ratio of new things to do or improvement to existing activities relative to the effort required. To this end, I'm also defining giving players more reason to do unpopular content as "new content" for this project.
Alright, preamble done. Let's get into some ideas for a better GW2.
1. Meta-event Rewards
So, remember how I just said that I'm counting "existing content that nobody does" as new content if we can find a way to make players actually go and do it? We're cashing that concept in immediately, because you could practically double the number of available activities in the game by just improving the rewards of existing meta-events enough that they're actually worth doing, and thus get ran successfully more often. This idea is actually twofold—many metas would benefit from improved rewards, but there are also some aspects of the game's rewards systems that could use some changes, as well.
Maps With Multiple Meta-events
There are a handful of maps in the game which have multiple meta-events, but the ones most relevant to this point are two from the PoF expansion: the Desolation and the Domain of Vabbi. Each of these have two metas on global timers, set to repeat at different times relative to each other. In the Desolation, those two metas are Junundu Rising and Maws of Torment; in Vabbi, it's Forged with Fire and Serpent's Ire. You would think this would be a great way to move players across the map, give them multiple things to do in quick succession, especially since, in Vabbi's case, Serpent's Ire starts immediately after Forged with Fire ends. Unfortunately, the rewards system has other ideas.
The main issue here is simple. For these metas, the primary reward comes in the form of the Hero's Choice Chest granted once per day after completion. For whatever reason, on maps with multiple HCC-granting metas, the reward is limited to once per day per map instead of once per day per meta. This means players need to pick only one of the two metas on each map to do on any given day, since they'd be wasting their time and not getting most of the reward if they tried to do the other one as well.
This is already a very significant problem, as it means the system is actively reducing the amount of content that's available for players to do. It gets even worse when you realize that, despite sharing their main reward, there are significant discrepancies in the time and effort required to complete these metas. Junundu Rising and Maws of Torment are actually quite similar in difficulty; MoT used to almost never get ran due to frequent bugs, but it has become more popular in recent times, thanks primarily to it being part of the Wizard's Vault task for completing a meta-event in Elona; for whatever reason, its counterpart in Junundu Rising isn't. The Vabbi metas, on the other hand, fare much worse—one gets ran very frequently, meanwhile I haven't personally seen the other be completed in literal years.
Forged with Fire is one of the shortest and easiest metas in the game. It can be completed in under ten minutes and is easy enough that you can realistically clear the entire thing with just a few players present, and especially skilled players can solo it. Serpent's Ire, on the other hand, takes closer to 20-30 minutes to beat, requires a large squad, and is among the few metas that somewhat consistently fails when it's actually getting ran. If you can only get rewarded for doing one of them each day, it's obvious the choice players will make.
This is a problem. We have a perfectly good meta here in Serpent's Ire, but the rewards system results in most players never running it. I haven't done it in years. If we improved the rewards system such that you could get the full reward for both metas on the map in the same day, we would effectively be adding an entire new meta to the game, given how rarely this one actually gets ran.
Metas With Bad Rewards
After metas that grant no rewards if you've done the easier alternative, the next biggest offender is metas whose rewards are just bad, period. There are numerous metas like 'Of Mists and Monsters' that don't get ran often simply because their rewards aren't enough to make the time and effort worth it for most players. The solution is simple; let's just improve the rewards so running these events is worth it.
I originally went on a huge tangent here about what actually makes metas popular, how the gold-per-hour profitability is a surprisingly small part of that, how many of the most popular metas are actually some of the least profitable, and ultimately made an entire spreadsheet analyzing various characteristics of every major meta-event in the game. That tangent became so large—and I found its contents so interesting—that I released it a week ago as its own article. Feel free to pause and go read that one if you'd like the full context; otherwise, here are the suggestions I landed on for how to best improve meta rewards and entice players to give the less popular ones the time of day.
- Players seem to care more about rare item drops than they do about rewards that are actually good on average. Not every meta needs to drop a tradable infusion worth thousands of gold, but the presence of some sort of exclusive reward will attract the veteran gamblers.
- Since players are mostly making guesses about which metas are or aren't profitable, including the recognizable signposts of "good rewards" is more important than the rewards actually being good. For one example, take Amalgamated Gemstones. These are offered by most HCCs, and they are almost universally the best option to take from them. Players recognize these as the main reward from most metas; therefore, a meta lacking one as a reward makes it seem less profitable. Adding HCCs to metas that lack them, and amalgamated gemstones as options to the HCCs that don't provide them (such as 'Of Mists and Monsters') will not only make these metas significantly more rewarding, but will also help them to feel rewarding to the average player.
- Additional signposting for how rewarding metas actually are could also help make many of them more popular. A good example is Twisted Marionette, a meta which most players falsely believe to have poor rewards despite them actually being quite good. An in-game indicator of what its rewards actually are could help to dispel the myth that it's unprofitable.
- Continuing off of the fact that most players aren't chasing optimal GpH, another reason the average player tends to run metas and other events is to farm map-specific currencies. Most of the LW3&4 metas are comically bad options for farming their maps' currencies; changing this by adding a significant amount of currency as a daily reward would give players an additional reason to participate in these metas.
- At the end of the day, having decent GpH is still somewhat important, even if the average player isn't checking that value. There are a handful of players who will base their gameplay decisions off of that value, and those players are often the ones forming squads that the average players then join. Providing them with more content worth farming in turn creates more content for all players. Furthermore, for the metas with the worst of the worst rewards, even the average player can tell that they aren't worth much and decide to avoid them—such is the fate of the Mistburned Barrens surveys and the Grothmar Valley mini-metas.
- In my opinion, a good spot for ANet to aim for would be to bring unpopular metas up to ~30 GpH at a minimum. This would make many competitive enough to at least be worthy of consideration, and ensure that no event sticks out as particularly unprofitable.
2. Make the Story Into Repeatable Content
GW2 has quite a large catalogue of story instances at this point. It's a shame, though, that in a game with such a large focus on content that's always relevant and endlessly repeatable, most players will likely not visit most of those story instances more than once throughout their time with the game. I think you can see where I'm going with this...
Story missions are technically "repeatable content" in that they are content you can repeat—with the exception of the Personal Story, you can replay any previously completed mission at any time. In practice, they aren't really repeatable content, because there's very little reason to repeat them. You might do so once or twice to get some achievements you missed, but then there's no real reason to ever replay the same mission again, as they provide essentially zero rewards on replay. The standard rewards for any given story mission are once per character, with only Tales of Adventure being a weekly reward.
My suggestion here is simple—let's take these once per character rewards and make them weekly along with the Tales of Adventure. Given how small story rewards are, this likely won't do much to draw players in, but it will help in situations where players may feel tempted to replay story missions for other reasons. Currently, the lack of any rewards on replay serves as a deterrent that might dissuade players from replaying missions; without this deterrent, other factors like achievements or Return To bonus events may stand a better chance at enticing players into story missions.
That would be the easy change to make, but if we wanted to take things a step further and make story missions into a real gamemode, all we'd have to do is improve the rewards they offer so they're competitive with other content. There's a lot of story in this game, so giving players a compelling reason to replay some of their favorite story encounters each week would essentially be like adding 100 single-man strike missions to the game. On that note, compelling solo content is also something GW2 sorely lacks; story missions with better, repeatable rewards could help to fill this niche, which is currently only occupied by DRMs. Speaking of,
3. Turn World Bosses Into Raid Bosses
This is an idea I've had floating around in my head for a while, and I think this would be a really effective way to create a ton of new content for raiders while also creating new avenues for new players to get into the gamemode—and all with minimal effort, since the encounters themselves all already exist.
Whenever I get the chance to do the EoD metas, I'm always impressed by just how fun and well-designed the world bosses are, and my favorite way to put my enjoyment of those encounters into words is to say "You could make this a strike mission and it'd fit right in." So... why don't we do that? Part of the point of strikes was to take fights from the story and convert them into instanced content, thus reducing the amount of mechanics and assets the team would need to create. We can do the same thing, and generate a massive quantity of new strikes for relatively little effort, by taking world bosses and repurposing them into raid encounters. Better yet, this might even be easier than taking bosses form the story is, since many bosses won't need any changes to their mechanics—just reduce their HP, divorce them from the code of their associated event(s), and slap them into a private encounter instance and you're done.
When it comes to rewards for these "new" encounters, there are a few ways the team could go about it. They could add new sets of raid coffers for all of these bosses, or they could still be treated more similarly to their open-world counterparts, perhaps granting the same reward as their meta-event with some bonus raid currency.
I've compiled a list of world bosses that I think could be a good fit for 10-man raid instances (both in the sense that all their mechanics would work for a small squad and that they would actually be fun to fight in an instance):
- Great Jungle Wurm
- Inquest Golem Mark II (its inclusion could be a good excuse to polish this boss up a bit, as well)
- Chak Gerent
- Destroyer Ignis/Aestus (they're identical, but maybe it's random which name is used each time you fight them?)
- Forged Hounds Tegon & Temar
- Warden Amala
- Zohaqan
- Renyak, Munitions Expert
- Corrupted Jade Behemoth
- Prototype XJ-1
- Ravenous Wanderer (just one instead of three)
- General Ignaxious
- Barbed Vale
- Hammerhart Twins
These are, of course, just the bosses that I personally think would be a good fit. If the team have different standards, or are willing to make some slight changes to the encounters, there are probably a bunch more they could add. I also limited my suggestions here to world bosses, but there are some enemies from generic events that could also make good strikes—off the top of my head, Ghostly Justicar Hablion and the Bog Queen are worth considering. There are also a bunch of cases throughout the game where bosses appear in groups and, while not individually worthy of a strike, could make for a good "boss rush" encounter; I imagine the team could cook up something along those lines for, for example, the bosses from The Breach in the Silverwastes and/or the three champions summoned by the Mordrem Vinewrath.
Though I mentioned this above in regards to the Inquest Golem, making additional content out of these world bosses would also be a good excuse to revisit some of them and make some improvements. The main point of this maintenance period is to improve things from throughout the game's entire history, after all; if we're gonna be updating these bosses either way, might as well double-dip and get the most out of that effort.
Another advantage of this approach is that it could provide another avenue for getting new players into raiding. Part of the intent of strikes was to ease players into raids by creating encounters they would alreayd be familiar with—after seeing the basic ideas of a fight in the story, they'd have an easier time learning the real fight in its strike version. This strategy had... mixed success, to be sure, but it wasn't zero success, and "world strikes" would be an even more effective way of building confidence in players, since A, world bosses are encounters they've likely done multiple times and are thus much more familiar with, and B, the mechanics wouldn't be changing for these, so the only new aspects they'd have to get used to is forming a squad with a proper comp. It'd be a great environment for practicing that particular aspect of raiding.
4. Utilize the Wizard's Vault
Desegregate the Gamemodes
We've had the Wizard's Vault for a few years now, and I think we can all agree it is vastly superior to the old daily system in almost every respect. For the purposes of this article, though, the operating word there is "almost". There is one thing that the old system has over the Vault—the fact that it let you perform any combination of dailies from the three gamemodes.
As the Vault functions now, you can pick any combination of the three gamemodes to decide what daily and weekly tasks can appear for your account. However, if you select multiple gamemodes, the total number of tasks will be divided between the gamemodes as opposed to granting you a full suite of tasks for each. This means that, if I have all three gamemodes selected but just don't feel like doing WvW today, it's impossible for me to complete my dailies. This actively incentivized players to avoid the two gamemodes they play less and instead limit their Vault to the one they play the most.
This is the one area in which the old system was superior. It provided a full set of dailies for all three gamemodes, enough that you could complete your dailies with just one gamemode; at the same time, it also let you freely mix and match tasks from different gamemodes. This was a great way to encourage players to try out the other modes. Don't like today's PvE dailies? Just hit up a match of PvP instead. The new system makes this gameplay loop impossible.
I would recommend completely redesigning the way this aspect of the system works. Instead of choosing which tasks can be assigned to you, the gamemode toggle in the Vault should only change which tasks are displayed to you at any given time, allowing you to filter out the ones you aren't interested in. Each day, players would be assigned four dailies from each gamemodes (for a total of twelve), and each week they'd similarly receive eight weeklies from each gamemode (for a total of twenty-four). This would, like the old system, allow you to freely mix things up and encourage players to try out the other gamemodes on occasion.
The only reason it doesn't already work like this, as far as I can tell, is that each task you complete in the Wizard's Vault grants you valuable Astral Acclaim—an issue that wasn't present for the old system, since the rewards for individual dailies weren't worth much. The solution here is simple: just make dailies stop providing Astral Acclaim after four of the twelve are completed, and similarly make weeklies stop providing Acclaim after eight of the twenty-four are completed. This would allow us to reap all the benefits of the old system without altering the balance of the new system. As described above, this would give players who are generally disinterested in certain gamemodes more opportunities to try them out.
Resegregate the Meta-Events
Since the Vault was added, ANet have gone to great efforts to refine the selection of tasks it provides, ensuring that each and every one is accessible to all players and that most can be completed in multiple ways. For the most part, this is a good thing, but there's one case in which I believe these changes have actually been for the worse, and those are the weekly meta-event tasks.
Every week, one of the weekly PvE tasks will be to complete any of a set of meta-events from a certain expansion, with alternative routes to completion by completing events in the region or in a given Core Tyria region. Those additional routes are fine; the actual issue here is the core task itself allowing you to pick from among a region's metas. This effectively removes what was previously a very useful tool to revitalize certain unpopular metas.
Of Mists and Monsters is a very unpopular meta. It's hard to command, it's decently long, and its rewards are abysmal. Runs of it are few and far between, and this has been the case even since Janthir Wilds launched. There was, however, one situation in which you could expect this unpopular meta to get ran regularly, and that was, of course, when OMaM was a weekly. Most players would prefer to do one meta over farming random events, so players would flock to the meta despite all the characteristics that usually made it unpopular. This is no longer the case.
When the Janthir Wilds meta task pops up, OMaM now has to share it with A Titanic Voyage, an event that has vastly better rewards. This effectively means that OMaM has completely lost the one thing that allowed it to actually get ran frequently. A similar fate befell the Maws of Torment meta, which also benefited greatly from being a weekly; the newer versions of these tasks hit it even harder than they did OMaM, as there are more than a paltry two metas to choose from in Elona.
My suggestion here is simple—take the "Complete any meta-event in X region" weekly tasks and split them back up into individual tasks for different specific metas. Those older versions are actually better for the overall health of the game, as they served as a tool to drive players to less popular metas. As I've mentioned several times in this article already, the next best thing after new content is giving players a reason to do the existing content they've been ignoring.
5. Give Us Daily DRMs
Dragon Response Missions are a very unpopular content type, as they have very lackluster rewards and many players were put off by their implementation in IBS. That said, the instances themselves actually aren't too bad in a vacuum, and running them solo can actually be quite fun. Despite their flaws, there are a handful of reasons for players to participate in DRMs—a huge number of achievements are tied to them, and as mentioned above, they're some of the only real solo content in the game. Unfortunately, one strange decision regarding the implementation of the IBS rewards system makes them less desirable than they could be: DRMs only have dailies once every four days.
In the achievement panel, the Daily Icebrood Saga category cycles through four different sets of achievements: one based on Grothmar Valley, one based on Bjora Marches, one based on Drizzlewood Coast, and one based on Champions (essentially, on DRMs). On Champions days, three random DRMs are selected as daily priority targets with a small additional reward; on the other three days, you're shit outta luck.
I've been slowly grinding my way through the DRM achievements myself recently, and I find myself trying to line up my efforts with the daily Champions days. Of course, I only really feel in the mood for DRMs every once in a while, so this often results in a pattern where I go "Hey, maybe I'll do a quick DRM", check the daily tab, see that it isn't the daily, and decide not to do it after all.
The solution to this is simple. Remove the Champions achievement set from the Daily Icebrood Saga cycle, and instead have three daily DRMs get selected every day in addition to whichever of the three IBS maps has its set of dailies active. This avoids the situation I described above and helps to always make DRMs just a little more rewarding.
You're gonna get real tired of hearing me say this by the end of this article, but another good idea would be to improve the rewards of DRMs altogether. Currently, an efficient clear of a DRM on Challenge Mode nets you ~10 GpH. If you remember the values from the meta-events we discussed earlier, you'll probably realize that that is really, really bad. ANet could—and, in my opinion, should—straight-up double or even triple the rewards provided by this gamemode to make participating in it more worthwhile.
6. Make the Personal Story Replayable
We already discussed above how the rewards of GW2's story could be reworked to take it from something that's technically replayable to something that players might actually want to actively replay. There is, however, a portion of the game's story that isn't currently replayable at all except by making a new character—the Personal Story.
The suggestion here is simple—make these instances replayable just like any other story mission. This would give us quite a big chunk of new instances to play with, particularly if we implement the earlier changes to story missions as well. At a minimum, it would make it possible to complete the weekly key farm without needing to keep a spare character slot at the ready or forcing you to delete a character, and that sounds like a good thing to me.
There are a couple ways these new instances could be implemented. The simplest would be if you could only access the series of instances that you completed over the course of any given character's Personal Story. Alternatively, players could be provided with a new UI displaying a "map" of all the story's branching paths and allowing them to try out the storylines of other races, orders, etc. Perhaps it could even be something for players to complete, with each instance only unlocking after completing it on at least one character, allowing you to map out all the paths you've taken across your account—maybe even with some rewards or achievements tied to filling out this map. This feature could potentially be accessed from the Scrying Pool in EotN or something similar.
Making the Personal Story replayable to any degree would also be a great excuse for the team to spend some time going through and improving many of the... let's say, lackluster instances throughout it. They've already expressed their intent to remake the Zhaitan boss fight, which is widely panned as a boring an anticlimactic conclusion to the story, but there are a bunch of other encounters throughout the Personal Story that are in similar need of attention due to how boring and drawn out they can feel. In many cases, just increasing the rate at which enemies spawn would significantly improve some of these, so they shouldn't be too hard to fix, either.
7. Add Some "New" Dungeons
Back in the original run of Living World Season 1, the Molten Facility and Aetherblade Retreat were released as temporary dungeons. Out of all the season 1 content, I can't imagine why they decided the dungeons should also be temporary, but unfortunately they did. Lucky for us, they already reintroduced LW1 back in the EoD era—all it needs is a few small adjustments.
In the modern recreation of LW1, these two dungeons have been repurposed into story instances. These are great, especially if we get some of the changes suggested above for the story, but we could get even more value out of them by also reintroducing the dungeon versions. The vast majority of the work for this is already done for the story versions; the team just has to swap the instance from a story one to a dungeon, scale the enemies up for a 5-man party, and add some dungeon rewards for completion, and boom—two entirely "new" dungeons for just a bit of work. With scaled-up enemies and the rewards to match, these would even be able to stand alongside their story equivalents if they got improved rewards as well.
While on the topic of dungeons, there's another one they could potentially reintroduce—Fyonna's path in Twilight Arbor. My understanding is that that this path was incredibly buggy, and that the team ultimately decided that it wasn't worth the effort of trying to fix and just removed it instead. If that's the case, it might still be more effort than it's worth, but I think it's at least worth considering as an option.
Finally, I'd like to point out that dungeons in general could really benefit from a sweep of quality improvements. Similar to some of the meta-events discussed earlier, many players seem to be under the impression that dungeons are unpopular because they have poor rewards, but that isn't actually true—if played efficiently, they're incredibly profitable, even capable of outpacing raids and fractals in terms of GpH. The actual main problem with dungeons is that the instances themselves, similar to the Personal Story, are filled with some frustrating and outdated sections that make them feel clunky to modern players. All of the bosses need better scaling, some puzzles need to be slightly reworked or at least better-explained (like that Arah light orb puzzle where you have to aim past the player you're throwing to, or that incredibly frustrating escort mission in the Citadel of Flame), and there are a variety of things that simply don't interact correctly with more recent skills, such as traps that damage you through skills that should make you invulnerable.
Dungeons could be made a much more intuitive and enjoyable experience with some simple tweaks. With a few of those, some better signposting for how good their rewards are, and a rework of the dungeon LFG, the gamemode could absolutely be revitalized. When it comes to the LFG, my suggestion is to remove all the tabs for the individual dungeons and instead condense it all into a "Story" and "Explorable" tab; this will make it easier for story players to find help, and it will make all dungeon LFG listings more visible and easier to track.
8. Add New CMs to Old Content
I actually think this suggestion adds quite a bit more value than the last few above it, but I'm placing it here, lower on the list, because it's the first one that's going to require the creation of completely new content. Every suggestion until now has been ways ANet could revitalized existing content by making slight adjustments to the systems, improving rewards, or refitting what they already have into something else; for this suggestion, they'll have existing content to use as a base, but they'll still most likely need to be creating entirely new assets and ideas to implement it.
Nonetheless, the idea is simple—take some of the old instanced content that doesn't have CMs and... well, give it some! Naturally, I'm thinking foremost of raids here; CMs could be given to the encounters of raid wings 1, 2, and 3, as well as to the Icebrood Saga strikes. The latter might seem unsuited to CM content given how easy they are, but I actually think that's more reason for them to have CMs. As the easiest instanced content in the game, the IBS strikes will be most players' first forays into raiding. If we give those easy strikes CMs, said CMs will likely also be most players' first CM content. It's a great way of introducing them to the idea of taking on the same boss but with additional and/or more punishing mechanics.
Another benefit of giving the IBS strikes CMs is that the easy 3 would get to shine as actual fights. Currently, you just completely ignore most of the mechanics in those encounters, because they don't do enough damage to be worth caring about. The CMs for these encounters could truly be as simple as giving them more HP, so you get to see more of the fight, and drastically ramping up their attacks' damage so you actually have to respect them and do the mechanics.
Another interesting addition that could be made is additional Legendary Challenge Modes for all the raids created in the pre-SotO era where that wasn't even a concept yet. If they followed the pattern of just the last boss getting the LCM, we'd be getting new hardcore challenges for Sabetha, Matthias, Xera, Deimos, Dhuum, Qadim, Qadim, and Harvest Temple. The IBS LCM would theoretically go to Varinia, but that just feels wrong to me... either way, this would be a great way to keep the hardcore community well-fed, and based on the two we have so far, LCMs shouldn't be particularly difficult to make.
Raids aren't the only content type that could benefit form new CMs, of course. Fractals also have a handful of their own CMs, and there are plenty of older ones that could receive some CM love as well. In particular, I'd love to see a Siren's Landing CM (so that you can skip right to the boss) and a Twilight Oasis CM (because that would be so fuckin' sick). Other gamemodes that currently lack CMs could also get in on the fun. Yes, I'm talking about dungeons.
One issue with trying to balance dungeons is that they're designed to be completable for new players who aren't even level 80 yet. This makes them incredibly susceptible to powercreep and the DPS gap—most of the time, their bosses are pathetically easy due to their low HP, but in the rare case you actually get a party of 5 new players, they should be just as difficult as originally intended. Adding dungeon CMs would be a convenient way to solve this issue while also giving dungeons some shiny new content and a bit of extra rewards. The CM versions could be scaled to level 80 and rebalanced around the strength of modern builds, while the normal versions are left more or less as-is so they continue to work for new players.
This didn't really fit into this section, but I'd also like a Dragonstorm CM for its private instances, I think that'd be sick as hell. You could maybe even do the same for private Twisted Marionette runs, too.
9. Give the People What They Want: A Joko Strike
This is an idea that I'm sure ANet are already well aware of, since it's something I and other players have been asking for for years. As mentioned above in my section on world boss strikes, part of the purpose of strikes as a gamemode was to reduce development costs by using the same assets and ideas for both story and instanced encounters, and that concept has now enveloped raids as a whole. What follows is intuitive—let's make strikes for the expansions that were made before strikes were a thing.
I include this idea at the bottom of the list not because it's the one I want the least—quite the opposite, actually—but because, of everything I've presented here, I believe this is the approach that would be the most work for ANet. They have the original story fights to use as a basis, yes, but unlike my proposed world boss strikes, which function as a clearly distinct "subcategory" of raids, these retroactive story strikes would have to be, well, actual strikes—the team would need to make large changes to the fights and their mechanics, which means a lot of programming work, a lot of testing, and potentially even some new asset creation.
That said, I'm pretty confident that this is up there as one of the top things ANet might already plan on doing during this maintenance period without me having to suggest it here. For the sake of completeness, I'll provide below my picks for the encounters I'd most like to see represented as strikes. In an ideal world, I'd love to have a roster of 4-5 of these for every expansion and living world, but if we need to be stingy, then:
- (Core) Zhaitan
- (Core, LW1) Scarlet Briar, or most likely her holograms from the final battle on the Breachmaker
- (LW2) The Shadow of the Dragon, perhaps mixing mechanics from the two different fights against it in LW2
- (HoT) The Mind of Mordremoth, which already sort of exists as a multiplayer instance, so it shouldn't take as many alterations as others
- (LW3) Minister Caudecus
- (LW3) Lazarus
- (PoF) Balthazar
- (LW4) Palawa Joko
- (LW4) Kralkatorrik's Torment
- Someone from (SotO). Only getting two strikes there always felt awkward, but I don't think we could really get an Eparch strike since the fractal fight against him is already based on his story mechanics. The main options in my mind are Heitor, Labris, or the possessed Isgarren.
- (VoE) Principal Biomancer Sebb, alongside Creations 5 & 7
Sebb and the 3rd SotO encounter are somewhat wishful thinking because I think they should've gotten strikes in the first place, but the rest comprise what I think the bare minimum of this sort of addition ought to be. Of course, I'd be more than capable of coming up with a full 4-5 boss roster for every expac and living world, but I'll spare you that for now; if that sounds like it'd be an interesting read, though, let me know—I might just make a few articles exploring that very concept.
Conclusion
Those are my nine genius ideas for how ANet can give us the greatest amount of "new" content possible with as little effort as possible. Of course, this maintenance period is probably going to last a couple years depending on how far out GW3 still is, so they have plenty of time to give us more, actual new content in addition to this; in my eyes, utilizing an optimized approach with strategies like what I outlined above would simply grant them even more time and resources to spend on such additions during this period.
The big focus of this article ended up being on that point I made early on—that if the game already has content nobody is doing, giving players a reason to start doing that content again is effectively the same as giving us actually new content. Given the main focus of this maintenance period is on improving the existing game, I have high hopes that ANet will do a whole lot of exactly that. If you happen to be an ANet employee reading this, I hope my suggestions prove helpful, and if they don't, I hope they at least serve as a good springboard for you to come up with some even better ideas. If you aren't an ANet employee, I hope my rambling about game design was adequately entertaining. Thanks for reading!
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